Veritone Inks Deal With ART19 to Use aiWARE for Intelligent Ad Targeting in Podcasting

Costa Mesa CA, USA—Veritone, Inc. (Nasdaq: VERI), the creator of the world’s first operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWARE™, today announced an agreement with ART19, a leading podcast hosting, content management, monetization, and measurement platform. ART19 will use aiWARE to run cognitive analysis and topical extraction on publisher podcasts that are hosted on the ART19 platform, making it possible for ART19’s advertising partners to target ads programmatically based on the content of an individual podcast episode.

“ART19 knows podcast advertising works. And advertisers know that ads can be incredibly successful if they’re reaching the right listeners at the right time,” said Lex Friedman, chief revenue officer at ART19. “By adding aiWARE to our platform, we’re empowering buyers to target ads to consumers based on the content of the episode they’re listening to. Listeners appreciate contextual and relevant ads — and that means they pay more attention to them.”

ART19 will integrate aiWARE’s transcription and topic analysis capabilities to enhance its targeted marketplace. The ART19 sales team will then be able to place contextually relevant advertisements within the podcast based on its subject matter.

Programmatic digital audio ad serving generally allows advertisers to reach users based on a combination of targetable attributes derived from first-party and third-party user data (such as zip code, age, gender, device ID, or internet browsing behavior). ART19 will use aiWARE to identify programmatically the topics discussed in a podcast episode, enabling the digital audio ad server to target or exclude ads based not only on who is listening to the content, but on the topical taxonomy of that content. Now, for example, a financial services firm can target ads to be played in podcast episodes that are discussing personal finance and are being listened to by 25- to 34-year-olds. Conversely, aiWARE can also support brand safety use cases, when an advertiser requests that its ads be excluded from any podcast episodes that discuss controversial topics.

Before aiWARE, there was no way for ART19’s employees to analyze and categorize topical metadata efficiently across thousands of podcast episodes. Now with aiWARE’s topical extraction capabilities, ART19 can automate this workflow and pass the metadata to the ad server, which will automatically include or exclude ads based on rule sets.

“We’re always looking for powerful tools that benefit everyone in our ecosystem to keep pushing podcasting forward — for publishers, advertisers, and listeners alike,” Friedman added. “aiWARE will lead to contextually relevant ads, which will serve publishers well in terms of revenue; yield great results for advertisers; and provide listeners with ads that feel native, custom, and in line with their interests.”

Unlike a single-point solution that solves only one use case, aiWARE affords ART19 a true AI operating system that makes its investment in AI future-proof. The aiWARE platform’s open architecture allows ART19 to integrate cognition from multiple machine learning algorithms into its existing technology stack seamlessly and to add more cognitive categories easily as new needs arise.

“aiWARE enables ad-tech capabilities within audio and video formats that were previously impractical because they exceeded the capacity and financial resources of human workforces. In a parallel to Google’s indexing of websites, Veritone’s aiWARE automates the systematic indexing and contextual extraction of hundreds of thousands of hours of audio and video content to enable new targeting and brand safety workflows,” said Veritone President Ryan Steelberg. “ART19’s deployment shows how refined targeting capabilities can deliver more efficiency for advertisers with a higher ROI on ad spend, all while creating a better listener experience.”

More information about Veritone’s products and services is available at www.veritone.com.